Crysis® Maximum Edition

There’s an open stretch of grass between me and the thin exterior wall of a small island village. The place is crawling with enemy troops, who move along the dirt roads and populate the ramshackle buildings in groups of two or three. Defensive turrets would already be firing at me if I my nanosuit wasn’t keeping me invisible, the energy bar barely moving for as long as I remain still.

Which brings us to today, upon which Eurogamer have run an interview with Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli. The interview is long and wide-ranging, and covers the current financial situation at the company, why wage payments got “delayed”, and where the company is now headed.

I’m not sure how a Homefront sequel that I didn’t really care about became a Crysis game that I really want to play, but that’s what I saw the other day. Homefront: The Revolution is Crysis. Hilariously Crysis. So very very Crysis. And yet it’s a Crysis game that Crytek haven’t even managed to make, despite having all the component parts.

Picture the GameSpy shutdown like a massive power-cut rolling out over an entire continent, plunging a significant portion of gaming's multiplayer catalogue into darkness. The hope is that some publishers have a backup generator, and will allow their games to flicker back to life via an alternate service.

For EA, the shutdown is an excuse to retire some older games from active duty to dramatically shift metaphors and they've now announced a list of casualties that includes 24 PC titles. What isn't yet clear is whether they're planning to re-enlist the most popular games in a list that includes Battlefield 2, Command & Conquer 3, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2.

"Since GameSpy s announcement, our teams have been working to evaluate options to keep services up and running," explains a new post on the EA blog. "Unfortunately, due to technical challenges and concerns about the player experience, we do not have a solution at this time. Online services for EA games on the GameSpy platform will be closed down at the end of June."

"We know some of these games are still fan favorites," the blog continues, "including Battlefield 2, Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Command & Conquer games. We are still investigating community-supported options to preserve online functionality for these titles, such as multiplayer. Significant technical hurdles remain, and at this time we don t have anything to announce."

Despite EA's lack of a solution, the online service GameRanger already supports games like Battlefront 2, C&C 3 and Battlefield 1942; meaning players will have a third-party solution when the shutdown occurs. Currently, then, the biggest casualties appear to be Battlefield 2 and popular mods like Project Reality and the Crysis games.

You can see the full list of games to be retired here. I've picked out the PC relevant ones below:

GameSpy giveth, and – years later – it shutteth down due to the cruleth realities of modern busineth practices and, in doing so, taketh away. The list of games affected by said untimely (but also kinda timely) demise is long and prone to billowing ominously in the wind, and we still don’t know what exactly will happen to a number of those trapped in its server purgatory. Sometimes, though, no news is good news. Case in point: it turns out that Crysis and Crysis 2 won’t be coming back online after GameSpy goes dark.

I didn t get to play Crysis multiplayer, and pretty soon I won't be able to give it a shot. As you ve probably heard, GameSpy s online matchmaking client is shutting down on May 31, meaning the games that used have to either find a different solution or go offline. Sadly, today Crytek confirmed that Crysis and Crysis 2 s multiplayer modes will no longer be playable. The conclusion of online multiplayer support comes as a result of GameSpy Technology shutting down all their hosting services, Crytek said on its official forum. GameSpy have been providing multiplayer functionality for Crysis and Crysis 2 since they launched. The single-player campaigns in both games are unaffected by this transition, and the multiplayer mode in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Crysis 2 remain playable. While we mourn the loss of multiplayer modes for these shooters, the good news is that many other developers are putting in the effort to finding a solution. Electronic Arts, Activision, Epic Games, Bohemia Interactive, and Gearbox have all announced that some or all of their games will survive the GameSpy shutdown.

GameSpy's online services will be shut down on May 31. Some publishers are actively finding a way to make their multiplayer games work. For example, older Battlefield games will continue operating, as will Arma. Developers like Capcom and Epic Games are planning workarounds. But, one franchise's legacy games will close its online doors come May 31: Crysis.

GameSpy, a relic from times long before the modern Internet – or indeed, games and spies – existed is closing down. This on its own is not surprising as the multiplayer service is, by modern standards, buggy and kind of a joke, but it leaves a startling number of games with their e-wings clipped and their online-heaving hams strung> in its wake. How many, you ask? Well, Reddit’s /r/Games board compiled a massive list, and the results aren’t pretty.

Can it run Crysis? If you re using Linux, the answer will eventually be yes. The German developer behind the first Far Cry and the Crysis series announced that it will show off its impressive CryEngine running natively on Linux for the first time during GDC.It s not licensed by as many developers as, for example, Epic Game s Unreal Engine, but State of Decay, Xbox One s Ryse, and MechWarrior Online are some of the games built with CryEngine, which is good news for Linux users and future Steam Machine owners.We knew that Crytek was working with Linux as far back as July 2013, when it posted a job opening for a programmer responsible for creating a Linux version of its 3D engine. Crytek didn t say in the announcement what game it will demo or if it will create Linux versions of its existing line-up, but it did say it will show off its free-to-play shooter Warface and a brand new mobile title, The Collectables.It should be a pretty interesting GDC for Linux this year. AMD will be there to talk more about Mantle, its low-level API that could potentially support Linux down the line, and Nvidia will also be at the show, presenting a session about Porting Source to Linux with Valve s Rich Geldreich.

This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.>

Games move pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss them. The pretties this week come courtesy not of a particular game, nor indeed me, but of the Dead End Thrills Flickr group, a caravan of some 500+ ‘players’ who spend more time stopping games and looking around than they do actually playing. The times we live in.

With some 11,000 images in there, I wasn’t sure how best to approach this. (Drunk, obviously, but how badly?) I’ve gone for the easy option: a round-up of games and/or users that stood out over the last few weeks. What you’ll often find is that wrangling games into ‘screenshot mode’ has knock-on benefits for any PC gamer, so let’s see if that holds true. (more…)